Young Lives eBook

The elder girls hastened to draw close to their father
in gratitude, and home breathed a kinder, freer air
than ever had been known before. Between Esther
and her father particularly a kind of comradeship began
to spring up, which perhaps more than ever made the
mother miss her boy.

But, all the same, home was growing old. This
was the kindness of the setting sun!

Childless middle age is no doubt often dreary to contemplate,
yet is it an egoistical bias which leads one to find
in such limitation, or one might rather say preservation,
of the ego, a certain compensation? The childless
man or woman has at least preserved his or her individuality,
as few fathers and mothers of large families are suffered
to do. By the time you are fifty, with a family
of half a dozen children, you have become comparatively
impersonal as “father” or “mother.”
It is tacitly recognised that your life-work is finished,
that your ambitions are accomplished or not, and that
your hopes are at an end.

The young Mesuriers, for example, were all eagerly
hastening towards their several futures. They
were garrulous over them at every meal. But to
what future in this world were James and Mary Mesurier
looking forward? Love had blossomed and brought
forth fruit, but the fruit was quickly ripening, and
stranger hands would soon pluck it from the boughs.
In a very few years they would sit under a roof-tree
bared of fruit and blossom, and sad with falling leaves.
They had dreamed their dream, and there is only one
such dream for a lifetime; now they must sit and listen
to the dreams of their children, help them to build
theirs. They mattered now no longer for themselves,
but just as so much aid and sympathy on which their
children might draw. Too well in their hearts
they knew that their children only heard them with
patience so long as they talked of their to-morrows.
Should they sometimes dwell wistfully on their own
yesterdays, they could too plainly see how long the
story seemed.

Telle est la vie! as James Mesurier said, and,
that being so, no wonder life is a sad business.
Better perhaps be childless and retain one’s
own personal hopes and fears for life, than be so relegated
to history in the very zenith of one’s days.
If only this younger generation at the door were always,
as it assumes, stronger and better than its elder!
but, though the careless assumption that it is so is
somewhat general, history alone shows how false and
impudent the assumption often is. Too often genius
itself must submit to the silly presumption of its
noisy and fatuous children, and it is the young fool
who too often knocks imperiously at the door of wise
and active middle age.